City Meets to Discuss New Point Bus Service

Dennis Evanosky

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

The city and AC Transit’s Inter-agency Liaison Committee will meet next week to discuss public-transportation-related developments. Among the items on the agenda are updates on bus lines 19, 31 and 96. Line 19 serves the Northern Waterfront, while lines 31 and 96 carry passengers from Alameda Point to the MacArthur and Fruitvale BART stations respectively.

The parties are also scheduled to discuss the EasyPass program that allows employers to provide transit passes to employees at a reduced cost. In addition, the committee will discuss a planned dedicated bus lane for Ralph Appezzato Memorial Parkway, the thoroughfare that connects Alameda Point with Webster Street.

The city is looking forward to 2020, when it hopes to initiate a partnership with AC Transit to expand bus service at Alameda Point to meet the demand brought on by new housing there. Jennifer Ott, the city’s base reuse and transportation planning director, penned a letter to Robert Del Rosario, AC Transit’s director of service development.

In the missive, Ott reminds AC Transit of the importance of implementing bus service to downtown Oakland. She also brings up a rapid-transit route from Telegraph Avenue in Oakland to Alameda Point that AC Transit approved in 2016. Ott reminds AC Transit that Alameda Point’s new residents will be providing “significant annual revenue from special taxes” to help fund these improvements.

If all goes as originally agreed, beginning in 2020, a new bus line would run every 15 minutes from 6 to 9 a.m. and from 4 to 7 p.m. from the planned ferry terminal at Alameda Point’s Seaplane Lagoon to the 12th Street BART station in downtown Oakland. Ott writes that the demand for this service will expand by 2020 with some 1,165 new Point residents and 380 employees. She projects that these numbers will grow, reaching 1,600 residents and 800 employees by 2023.

According to the numbers, special taxes and EasyPass revenues would total $486,000 a year, while expenses would add up to $800,000. AC Transit would spend some $314,000 to bridge the gap.